At CrossFit Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina, members include children as young as 4, professionals in their mid-40s and senior citizens.

“I like to say we’re ‘the 98 percent,’” owner Karen Candia says. “When you really think about the CrossFit Games, there’s only a small percentage of the population that’s ever going to get there.”

The median age of the CrossFit Ocean Isle Beach membership is 45. Typically, members are married with children and have a professional career, Candia says. In this video, several members talk about how they found CrossFit and why they keep coming back.

“We have athletes that train here that are in their 70s, and they keep up and they do just as well as our 20-year-olds,” Candia adds. “And we make sure that everybody understands that everything is about their own fitness level, so it’s not about competing with somebody who’s two decades younger.”

In 2005, Bryan St. Andrews helped found one of the earliest CrossFit affiliates, CrossFit SouthWest, in Tempe, Ariz., not far from Arizona State University. Five years later, he moved back… Continue Reading

When Hurricane Sandy made landfall Oct. 29 in New Jersey, it wreaked havoc. The Category 1 storm was 932 miles in diameter and packed winds of up to 100 miles per hour, making… Continue Reading

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.